To Vaccinate or Not To Vaccinate, That is the Question

I couldn’t decide whether or not I wanted to vaccinate my 2 year old against the seasonal flu or H1N1. I’d heard rumblings in the media and blogosphere that the H1N1 vaccine was unsafe…people were suffering side effects…it’s too new. I started thinking about all the people that put their child on a delayed vaccination schedule to avoid them getting too much medicine pumped into their system at once and wondered if they were doing the right thing. I wondered if the flu vaccine was really necessary. It made me consider not having my son receive either flu vaccine.


Then I started hearing how H1N1 is hitting children particularly hard and that many of the people dying from this strain of flu have pre-existing medical conditions. My son has a heart defect among other things, so I was scared not to vaccinate him, but I was also scared to vaccinate him. I consulted with coworkers, the Internet, and a friend that works at the CDC and oddly enough Facebook helped me decide.

A Facebook friend asked if anybody was getting their children vaccinated. All of the responders said no, but one naysayer also made a good point. The flu vaccine is new every year. Every year doctors have to anticipate which strain of flu will hit and create the vaccine around that. The only reason H1N1 wasn’t included in the seasonal flu vaccine this year was because it presented too late. A work colleague pointed out that until someone could provide a story of a child suffering from horrific side effects from the vaccine that would compare to that of a child going from having the sniffles to being on life support; she was going to lean toward vaccination.

In the end, because of a well-timed e-mail from our pediatrician’s office saying they were giving out the H1N1 vaccine at their next flu clinic, we decided giving the vaccine was less dangerous for our child than not. He and my husband waited in line for one and a half hours at the end of a five-hour flu shot clinic. (They got there at the very beginning and the line was already very long. People were parking a mile away.) Two injections in the leg and a Band-Aid later, we’re keeping our fingers crossed that we made the right choice.

--Green Mom